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I will be appearing at this year’s Edinburgh Festival at 1430 on the 24th August.

The talk will cover issues raised in Who Owns the World and will also deal with why and how the book came to be written. Amongst matters I will raise will be the relationship between poverty and prosperity and how the latter has occurred in the mainly developed countries of the world through a marginal and small scale redistribution of land . Taking the long view, mainly because there is no other view to take when dealing with the history of the race, it’s current status and the poverty of so many of the planetary population, I will suggest that there is room for optimism. That things do change for the better and that such a change can be brought about by ignoring short term punditry, understanding the media and its ultra short attention focus, and understanding the actual volume of land in the world.

I will remind the audience that the cliche recently cited on the cover of the New Scientist, that this is a crowded planet, is not borne out by the facts. That there are 36 billion acres of land on the earth and only 6,500 million people to fill those acres, more than half of which are arable or habitable or both.

Other issues I will cover will include;

Land and housing in the UK.

Land and law in the UK and elsewhere.

The status of the Queen as the world’s largest legal landowner

The UK’s 2nd domesday and the implications for modern economics.

Future dwellings and future workplaces; the role of land.

Land registries generally, including those in the UK and their shortcomings

Space limitations in the printed book meant that some countries were confined to just one or a few pages. The key countries thus truncated were Canada, China, Russia and India. Each of these countries will be posted here when more information is available about their structures.